The world's largest social network Facebook has listed Kosovo as a country more than five years after the breakaway territory proclaimed independence from Serbia, officials said Tuesday. "Facebook recognises Kosovo as a state," Minister for EU Integration Vlora Citaku wrote on Twitter. And Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said in a statement that he "was informed (on Monday) by senior Facebook executives... about including Kosovo in the global social network".

Members of Mexico's drug cartels are really starting to harness the power of the internet, using it to run positive PR campaigns, post selfies with their pistols, and hunt down targets by tracking their movements on social media. Antoine Nouvet from the SecDev Foundation, a Canadian research organization, has been working with drug policy think-tank the Igarapé Institute on a project called the Open Empowerment Initiative.

One morning in June, the owners of the African restaurant La Mamma in Warsaw found ugly and offensive graffiti near its entrance. Someone in the Muranow neighborhood, the site of the former Jewish ghetto, apparently did not like the restaurant, which is a meeting place for Nigerian immigrants. To make sure the eatery’s owner got the message, the offender painted a black man hanging from a rope and added the words, “chocolate daddy.”

The active presence of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Facebook and Twitter has been a great tool and venue for Iran’s public diplomacy with Western journalists. It has also served as an unfiltered source of direct interaction between Zarif and the Iranian Internet-savvy youth.

Yesterday, the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reported that Iran’s Communication and Information Technology Minister Mahmoud Vaezi, talking about social-media websites such as Facebook, said, “It has not been planned that these websites will be unblocked, and they will remain in the same condition they were in before.”

Two researchers, Mark Graham and Stefano De Stabbata, at the Oxford Internet Institute have depicted the world’s “Internet empires” in a map, below. The map shows each nation’s most popular website, with the size of nations altered to reflect the number of Internet users there. The map makes for a brief, informative look at how geographic—and universal—certain web tastes and habits are.

As Twitter heads toward its high value IPO, the attention is on its revenue and growth numbers. However, a big part of the story is the pervasiveness and influence of the messaging service. Compared with Facebook, with over a billion users, Twitter is a midsize town, with about a quarter of the audience.

China's recent history has been marked by two key features: rampant economic growth and tight governmental control on the spread of information. Now, it seems, both are starting to wane, as economic expansion is slowing down and even the government's zealous grip on the internet is beginning to loosen.